Attentional orienting abilities in bilinguals: Evidence from a large infant sample

Abstract

A key question in studies of cognitive development is whether bilingual environments impact higher-cognitive functions. Inconclusive evidence in search of a "bilingual cognitive advantage" has sparked debates on the reliability of these findings. Few studies with infants have examined this question, but most of them include small samples. The current study presents evidence from a large sample of 6- and 10-month-old monolingual- and bilingual-exposed infants (N = 152), which includes a longitudinal subset (n = 31), who completed a cueing attentional orienting task. The results suggest bilingual infants showed significant developmental gains in latency performance during the condition that was most cognitively demanding (Incongruent). The results also revealed bilingual infants' performance was associated with their parents' dual-language switching behavior. Taken together, these results provide support that bilingual experiences (i.e., dual-language mixing) influence infants' shifting and orienting of attention.

Keywords: Attention; Bilingualism; Infancy; Language mixing; Longitudinal; Shifting.

Figure 1.

Example trials for the attentional orienting task: congruent trial on top row, incongruent trial on bottom row.

Figure 2.

Bar graphs representing differences in latency performance for congruent and incongruent trials in the bilingual sample, by parents’ report on dual-language intra-sentential mixing. The bars to the left (−1 SD) represent infants’ performance from parents who report a high likelihood of mixing (e.g., 1=very true). The bars to the right (−1 SD) represent infants’ performance from parents who report a low likelihood of mixing (e.g., 7=not at all true).